Watching a video, toddlers with autism reacted to action, not emotional content.

Related

MONDAY, Dec.
12, 2011 (HealthDay News) — Toddlers with autism
show different blink patterns than other children, a finding that researchers
say may provide a clue to the way people with autism process what they see.

Blinking
is largely an involuntary process that helps keep the eyes hydrated and
protected. During that split second that your eyes are closed, you are
temporarily blinded. And throughout a typical day, adults spend about 44
minutes with their eyes closed.

The current study got
started when Sarah Shultz, a graduate student at the Yale Child Study Center,
noticed that kids blink less often when watching videos. She and her colleagues
wondered: Would kids with autism, who have impairments
in social communications, including reading facial expressions and
interacting with others, show the same blink timing?

In the study, researchers
had 93 typically developing children and children with an autism spectrum
disorder, all aged 2, watch short videos of two children in a wagon who get
into an argument over whether the wagon door should be open or shut. Using
eye-tracking technology, the researchers tracked when and how often the kids
blinked.

Researchers found that both
the kids with autism and typically developing kids blinked less during the
video.

However, typical kids
blinked less during the emotional
exchange between the kids, while the autistic kids blinked less when
there were moving parts, such as the wagon door being slammed.

"We have a new way of
understanding not just what people are looking at but how engaged they are with
what they're looking at," said senior study author Warren Jones, director
of research at the Marcus Autism Center and an assistant professor in the
department of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

"The more engaged you
are, the less likely you are to blink," Jones said. "That's what we
saw with those 2-year-olds. We were stunned to see typically developing
2-year-old kids would not blink when something emotionally exciting or charged
was happening in the movie. What we saw in 2-year-olds with autism was they
were more likely not to blink while looking at physical objects in
motion."

When you blink, you
"lose" a bit of information, Jones added. Therefore, not blinking is
a sign that kids find that information most important, engaging or relevant.

The study is published in
this week's online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences.

Prior research has found
that kids with autism pay less attention to social cues and social information,
Jones said. "What these new findings and new measure really gives us is an
opportunity to look at in more detail how kids with autism are engaging in
whatever it is they are looking at," he said.

Rebecca Landa, director of
the Center for Autism & Related Disorders at Kennedy Krieger Institute in
Baltimore, said the study uses a "novel" technique to examine how
kids with autism process information and respond to things they see.

"The more evidence
that we have about the nature of the information that children with autism are
either delayed in deciphering — in this case, through visual pathways
— or that they have certain preferences or biases for, the more
informed we can be in the development of interventions," Landa said.
"That's why this is important. We try to take ever more precise steps into
understanding what children with autism understand and how they extract
information from the world around them."

The study also found that
typically developing kids "inhibited" their blinking sooner than the
kids with autism, suggesting that they're better able to anticipate what might
unfold between the two children on screen.

"There's a growing
body of information that young children with autism are not paying attention to
or extracting information from social sequences in the same way as typical
kids," Landa said, noting that treatments that break down such information
into smaller bits, as well as making sure kids with autism are repeatedly
exposed to such situations, may help them start to comprehend the emotional
aspects of social interactions.

Geraldine Dawson, chief
science officer for Autism Speaks, said it's well-established that unlike
typical kids, young children with autism pay more attention to objects than
people. "However, this is the first study to my knowledge that has used
blinking to assess how engaged a child is with what he or she is viewing,"
Dawson said.

The results suggest that
blinking could be used as a way of measuring whether therapies designed to help
a child with autism increase their emotional engagement are working, she said.

"If a child is not
visually engaged with the social world, this can affect the development of
neural systems that underlie social behavior which rely on social stimulation
for development," she added. "The hope is that, as a result of
therapy, the young child with autism will show higher levels of attention and
engagement with the social world and this will open up opportunities for
learning."

This site complies with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information: verify here.

Advertising Notice

This Site and third parties who place advertisements on this Site may collect and use information about
your visits to this Site and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of
interest to you. If you would like to obtain more information about these advertising practices and to make
choices about online behavioral advertising, please click here.